In the cold regions of Upstate New York, snow-and lots of it-is a fact of winter. During the blustery months, a couple of feet of the white stuff regularly accumulate on Anheuser-Busch's tractor trailers loaded with fresh brew from the plant in Baldwinsville. This extra seasonal weight up top posed a problem.

"If the truck exceeded the established weight limit, some product had to come off," says Rich Quinn, vice president and partner of Eastern Mountain Solar Corp. "So there was one less pallet of beer per truck per trip all winter long," which, in the long run, added up to lost revenue.

So Anheuser-Busch began looking for a solution that would allow it to achieve the goal of shipping more product ... snow or no snow. The company investigated using electricity to melt the snow at its weigh station a half-mile from the main plant but running the needed lines would have been too costly.

"They also looked at using oil or propane but that would have involved a tremendous amount of fossil fuel, too," Quinn says. Eventually, executives approached Eastern Mountain Solar to see if it could come up with a snow melt plan.

The solar company proposed a setup that integrates evacuated tube solar collectors with storage tanks, a scraper and a sump system. Basically, a snow scraper system cleans snow and ice off the top of the trucks and deposits the mixture into a grated sump below. The frozen slush is then melted by hot water that's continually heated by a closed-loop, water-glycol solar system.

The storage tanks, controller and evacuated tube arrays were supplied by Solar Panels Plus, a leading U.S. manufacturer of solar thermal, hot water and space heating products headquartered in Chesapeake, Va.

At the bottom of the sump, a concrete slab equipped with heated pipes serves as a radiant floor that keeps the water covering it very hot. "Heated water melts snow faster than a bare slab would," Quinn explains, and the slab works as stored "mass" and helps keep the water at a higher temperature. The piping system, which is self-contained under pressure, connects to two insulated hot water tanks stored in a pump building.

"We worked closely with Solar Panel Plus to determine the amount of heat that would be output by the company's thermal panels of evacuated tubes," Quinn says about the SPP-30As. They determined that a 16, 30-tube array facing due south could average 496,000 BTUs a day, with the system able to produce more than 1 million BTUs on a clear sunny day, even in subfreezing temperatures.

With this setup, Quinn says, "Enough heated water is stored so Anheuser-Busch can melt the snow in the sump 24/7." The excess cool water is pumped to a nearby retention pond.

The system is also equipped with a data logger, Quinn adds, where the temperature is automatically logged and the data transmitted to the plant. "The solar controller does the math and achieves the maximum amount of heat storage per day based on what it can make.

"There are many different ways you can use alternative energy," he says. "We can help you find ways to produce heat and electricity for different applications, applications you may not always think would work for your situation."